Sausage, such as pork sausage, is frequently stuffed in natural casing. Because natural casing has a generally spiral configuration, after stuffing and linking, the links have a generally curved or bowed shape. The sausage links are normally packed in boxes, and due to the bowed configuration, automatic packaging equipment cannot be used to package the sausage links, but instead the sausage links must be manually packaged. Manual packing results in substantially increased labor costs as compared to situations where automatic packaging equipment can be utilized.